


Vascular Voltage

by Perk



Category: Steam Powered Giraffe
Genre: Canon Trans Character, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, The power of friendship, Unrequited Love, certain robots experience deeper emotions than certain scientists, getting through a tough situation with self-expression, though I don't discuss it here it's just if you're sorting for representation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-12
Updated: 2017-09-12
Packaged: 2018-12-26 17:38:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12063825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Perk/pseuds/Perk
Summary: A short hurt/comfort story about Rabbit falling in love, learning to leave lost love in the past, and becoming stronger for writing Honeybee.





	Vascular Voltage

When the automatons agreed amongst themselves that they would download a vow of peace after the Vietnam War, the Walter family could not give the American government sufficient answers as to why or how this could have happened. The family were extremely gifted engineers, but far from dedicated psychologists, and all too content to leave the answer at "they just decided to." The government determined they were too biased to give an accurate account.

The family agreed that once a month a group of scientists could come by their manor and study the group of autonomous people, contingent upon the consent of each automaton, and with the understanding that the examinations would be purely psychological with a goal of increased understanding between all parties. As it was a time before the Walter Workers, minor repairs would be offered if the automatons requested any from the "doctors’ visits," but the secrets of blue matter were off limits.

For the most part, the automatons didn't mind the questioning. They playfully equated the large dossier field reports to report cards and amused themselves by angling with local restaurant chains to be awarded the same arcade coins as straight-A students, with varying degrees of success.

They met with a lot of scientists; over fifty of them, all some level in schooling at cognitive psychology. Most of them worked with all of them, though many of them worked mainly with The Spine, as the most forthcoming and also the most likely to remain on topic. The main talking points during the visits seemed to be about whether or not the quixotic nature of autonomous psyche added any new light onto the old argument of human nature being inherently good or evil. And of course, by way of funding, whether or not it was permanent or reversible, and under what circumstances could the government expect it to be reversible.

Only one scientist worked with Rabbit almost exclusively. She was a young woman who dabbled in cognitive psychology as an undergrad but the trade of her master’s degree was in orthotic engineering. She was hired on as one of the people who could help the committee understand how the automatons’ robotic builds influenced their psychology, and could help with repairs. She was maybe too serious to pair with Rabbit's joking disposition, but after some months of spending a day in each other’s company, they grew closer and closer, and Rabbit learned more about her as she gave answers about herself, then turned the questions back onto the scientist.

Her name was Honeybee.

* * *

Rabbit's eyes were of course closed, but she appeared all the more animated for it, as if by not having to respond to the sensory inputs of movement and color she could focus on being more reactive to the sensation of touch. As Honeybee's 1mm steel wool detail brush flittered along, combing and refining the application of the new eyelashes, her organic hand felt perhaps a degree of heat hotter than the usual slight chill raise off of Rabbit's faceplate, which made her stop and consider the undercurrent of sound. There was a gentle whirring which indicated that Rabbit was copying this experience from her RAM to her hard drive.

_whirrr whirrr whirrr_

Random access memory was good for what it was good for, and understanding the precise color of each pixel of sky image she captured was good for keeping Rabbit safe from unforeseen weather, but thousands of sky images from a day over three months ago were unnecessary cumbersome data which she would need to either write over or hook up somewhere for upload and expulsion. Sensory input allocated to memory meant that Rabbit had made the decision to allow this data to inform future renditions of who Rabbit was, the same way organic beings take in and are changed by important life experiences. The whirring meant that she was processing overtime, recording a large bundle of information - not just the sounds she was hearing but everything that each sensor she was built with could take in. Probably everything from the exact force of the air of Honeybee's exhales to the length of her fingernails on her left hand as she felt them steadying her work on her shoulder.

Honeybee added this experience to her own schema of Rabbit, the organic way, forming the opinion that Rabbit rather liked her, or recognized her as an important noteworthy figure at any rate, because she seemed to be clearly dedicating memory of her whenever she was around, whatever she was doing. It was touching to her. Honeybee, a particularly incautious and curious scientist, brought her findings up for review.

"How do you feel about the application of your new eyelashes, Rabbit?"

Rabbit didn’t search herself too deeply for a simple emotional answer. "Good." She was smiling gently.

Honeybee prompted further, "Do you find contentment beyond the contentment of knowing that your photo receptors will be safe from large debris?"

Rabbit could come up with no examples of other conversations she had had that could inform her of what to say next, but she knew that Honeybee was, while often pushy about her divulging her experiences as an automaton, also sympathetic and not all that concerned about "ruining the data with leading questions." If she couldn't figure out what Honeybee wanted to hear, she might ask for help. As Rabbit felt her step away and cap the brush, she opened her newly decorated eyes and formed them into an inquisitive state. She watched as she sorted the various tools she had used into holders, and placed those holders back into their proper spots on the wall over the workbench. It had been an easy-going day between the two of them. Few questions, more observances on Honeybee’s part, mostly enjoying the other's company.

"You know, when I was very little, my older sister used to brush my hair. Millennia of evolution has helped shape me into something that enjoys grooming as an activity that keeps me from getting sick as well as a social bonding opportunity."

Honeybee often called herself a "something" around her. Rabbit was still figuring out if she appreciated or resented that, but she didn't mind Honeybee's overly practical word usage on the whole.

"When she would brush my hair, it felt nice as a sensation as well as nice because I liked her and liked spending time with her."

"...yeah, I feel ya." Rabbit's autonomous nature meant a lot to her, and she wouldn't speak with the precision of Honeybee’s scientific accent if she could help it. Slang was a part of who she was proud to be; a developed person capable of thought and slang.

Honeybee smiled gently and put a hand to Rabbit's cheek, where she could feel that it was still all too obvious that Rabbit was recording the moment. "I like you too."

The volume of the whirring and the degree of heat coming off the motors were the same, regardless of if Rabbit allocated something life-influencing to memory, or life-altering.

* * *

The Spine had always tried to be the most polite and considerate version of himself that he could ever be. That's why when Rabbit turned her head at hearing his voice low and stern and saw his glare at a visiting scientist, she knew immediately that someone had tried to push too far in questioning him, and she didn't have to work hard to guess what the question was likely to have been. Probably details about one of the few emotional experiences The Spine outright refused to talk about.   
  
She had been in the middle of answering a question of Honeybee's, but she walked right on over to the spot where she would create her altercation. Honeybee didn't seem to mind, she seemed interested in studying her impromptu movements with a careful gaze.   
  
When she made eye contact with The Spine he seemed relieved to see her, which was all the encouragement she needed. She swung her arm through the offending scientist's arm and held on like a stroll through the park. "Hey there sir!" she mocked in a sing-song voice, "I know you're not being disrespectful of my friend's boundaries, because if you were," she squeezed tight and as she walked away the man had no choice but to follow or lose his footing, "you'd get kicked out on your ass, and a bruise from a metal foot would probably hurt like hell on someone with skin, I mean, I bet."   
  
When she returned from escorting the man to the door, The Spine bowed his head gently to her in appreciation, and they both went back to answering questions for the last half-hour left in the government agents’ work day.   
  
"I'm sorry, what was I answering?"   
  
Honeybee smiled at her. "Oh, probably just the same questions I've asked a hundred different ways," which was true. "Honestly it doesn't matter, I'm more interested in how you helped your friend over there."   
  
"How I helped him? You saw, I showed that asshole the door."   
  
"Hm, I suppose I mean, how you came to the decision to help him. Has The Spine ever requested that you remove threats for him?"   
  
At the choice of the word "threat," Rabbit giggled out a small bit of steam. "No, it's just... he shouldn't have to say it again and again every month! He's made it clear that he doesn't want to talk about Vietnam, which for some reason makes some of you guys all the more interested in pestering him over it."   
  
"So because he was displaying that he was uncomfortable, you came to his aide?"   
  
"He's my friend and if I can help him, I will."   
  
Light chatter followed crowds of workers thinning out. Honeybee considered her words for a moment. "You know, Rabbit," she said in a soft whisper that drew Rabbit in closer, "one of the key reasons we're here is to talk about things that can make us all uncomfortable. Beyond our mission, it might even be part of the work that needs to be done so that The Spine can heal."   
  
Rabbit crossed her arms over her chest, a little frustrated.   
  
Not one to miss such an obvious cue that she was herself overstepping some boundaries in her implications, Honeybee relied on her newly discovered method of softening Rabbit up to her—an appeal to an overtly recognizable effort at bonding—a light touch of her hand to her cheek.   
  
Rabbit leaned into it. _whirrr whirrr whirrr_   
  
"Can you tell me something I've been wondering for a while? I don't know if maybe you would even know the answer to it." Honeybee saw that her attention was rapt, and her soft voice kept on, "How do you find yourself wanting things? I know that's a tough question to parse, let me try again. Whenever I make a decision as an organic being, my body goes through a reward system of dopamine release or restriction. I would receive chemical levels of joy for helping my friend, rewarding my smart decision to keep us stronger as a group. What happened in you that made you do the same just now?”   
  
Entirely too conscious of Honeybee's hand and not willing to move the slightest bit if it ruined the moment, Rabbit released sound muffled through her voicebox without the clarity of opening her mouth. " _You're-right,-I-don't-know._ " The reverberations felt dangerous, like they might shake the moment away.   
  
"I see..." The room was brightly lit, but this close, Honeybee's eyes acutely reflected Rabbit's own glow, and Rabbit calculated the refracted angles in each mountain and valley of iris. "Well how about this, then, how would someone like me encourage participation from someone like you?"   
  
" _Someone-like-me?-_ Like _-me-I-don't-know,-but,-for-me,-for-me-personally,-when-you-ask-questions-I'm-inclined-to-answer-them.-It-makes-me-happy-to-think-I-can-help-you-with-something.-Especially-if-you're-doing-_ this."   
  
Rabbit mimicked the gesture and put her own hand up to Honeybee's cheek.   
  
To Rabbit, it was an admission of something that she felt more than the words she couldn't quite put it all into.   
  
To Honeybee, it meant that the hypothesis that automatons respect overt expressions of social bonds was solidifying, and she could work on forming a tangent hypothesis that the expressions of those bonds were learned behavior through mimicking human interaction.   
  
Honeybee brought the pad of her thumb from under Rabbit's eye to resting on her lips, to test how she would react to an expression of social bonds that she had not likely seen someone display before.   
  
Rabbit kissed it. It was all she thought about for the next thirty some-odd days. 

* * *

"Listen Rabbit, it's a very important humanitarian project. They need me out there meeting with, taking measurements of, and designing to individuals' needs."

Rabbit desperately performed call and recall after call and recall, trying to make sense of the statement without the gut-punch that stung from the use of the word "humanitarian."  _Concerned with or seeking to promote human welfare_ as a definition in this situation seemed at direct odds with being concerned for Rabbit's welfare, though she told herself that she believed the two concerns could coexist in Honeybee.

"Sure, yeah, I understand that. They need prosthetics and stuff and you can help. I just feel like you're being a little rash here all what with saying stuff as serious as you're saying. 'Goodbye' and 'I enjoyed watching you grow' an-an-an-an-an-an-and stuff." Rabbit would complete her sentence through the circuit hiccup if it killed her.

Honeybee reactively looked behind Rabbit into the rest of the foyer, where at the end of the hall, The Spine had started to come over in greeting. When he realized the scene he politely but quickly removed himself to give the two their space.

Rabbit saw her gaze move to inside of the manor and her thoughts raced to diffuse the tenseness in the air; palpable fear and stress that Honeybee didn't seem to be letting on that she shared any part in. "Please, just, come on in and have some tea or coffee or something? We can talk about how I can help out there too."

"No, again, I'm just here for a moment to alert you to the change and to say goodbye. I'm not going to be working on your project anymore. This is the end."

"They—they'll only take a little while to help?"

"And then I'll be on to my next project. It's how it is. People go through careers working on one thing and then the next."

"You're acting as if—I mean, you're moving on from more than just a project, you're moving on from a person too!" Rabbit didn't care that her feedback indicated that she seemed to have raised her voice without her noticing.

"Yes, an incredible person. Someone who worked very hard to get to where she is today. I'm proud of you." Honeybee smiled a professional smile. The words drowned Rabbit.

"I don't," Rabbit twitched, not caring to put fluidity into her movement, too preoccupied, "I don't care how _proud_ you are! I want you to care that I care about you leaving!"

Honeybee's face showed the first signs of being uncomfortable. "Of course I care. I'm touched that you will miss me. I'll miss you too."

Neither could come up with anything to say after that, and the heavy moment stuck around.

_whirrr whirrr whirrr_

"I think the last thing I'll say is that I encourage your exploration into what missing someone means. Good luck, Rabbit."

Honeybee hugged Rabbit the way one would hug a mannequin, as Rabbit was having trouble with movement along a physical plane to react in time. The scientist opened the door behind her and saw herself out.

After a long, difficult, blank moment, Rabbit self-reflected, and explored the possibility that she was malfunctioning. Clearly by Honeybee's indication, the proper level of stress to feel at a final goodbye was lower than she was experiencing.

As she calculated the scenario as it had happened a million different ways to determine where her malfunction had occurred and to what extent, The Spine reemerged, took her hand gently and guided her into the study, where he sat quietly with her, sympathizing. 

* * *

She calculated. She vented her steam and her voice. She isolated herself from the rest of the scientists each month that passed, always hiding up on the roof of the Walter manor until she saw the last car leave for the night. She had made a switch from mutual curiosity and openness to resenting lines of questioning about if she "really could feel" how terribly she missed Honeybee. The government workers tried appealing to the other automatons, lecturing them about how Rabbit's experiences were important data to share, but they never passed along the messages, caring too much for her.  
  
Eventually funding ran out for the project when the nation settled into a time of peace. The final dossiers were released. Rabbit hadn't read a single one since Honeybee had moved on.

She had come to the conclusion that she just needed to do proper research on the maintenance needed for whatever was in her that was off-kilter and had exhibited the emotional glitch. Finding nothing helpful in the Walters’ own server or physical library of part manuals, she tried a town public library, where she found a self-help book. "Translating" it for wired people, she decided that she had been stuck letting information about Honeybee live on the emotional fields. It was safe to let her live in memory without also letting her live in emotional memory. While the book didn’t help her determine what her malfunction had been or how she could have avoided it, she was at least happy to have a path of action she could move on, where she could leave her mistake behind her.

It took a lot of time, but Rabbit found a somewhat stable comfort again. At least one that lasted her from the mid nineteen-seventies to the new millennia.

* * *

Some many years later, as a thinking being capable of making shitty mistakes, she poked the bruise.

With time to waste on a whim, she had wandered virtually into the server records QWERTY held on the old field reports. She figured she'd just glance at what the last thing Honeybee ever said about her was, and she was so certain that she was capable by then of handling whatever she came across.

In the paper from the month that Honeybee had left in the middle of, her name had been included on the list of contributors, which meant that there was indeed something Rabbit hadn’t yet seen. It wasn’t broken down by writer, it was broken down by hypothesis and then by each automaton’s relevance to the hypothesis. One stood out. It wasn’t attributed, but the moment in the foyer was the picture that appeared in this stereogram.

“...may indicate that at least one automaton could have the emotional capacity to feel extreme loss connected to an entity, organic or mechanical, of whom/which they hold in close regard.”

And then, under the Recommendations For Further Study section, “...a loss module to the theoretical test to develop an understanding of the specifics of the robotic emulation of love.”

So.

It was right there, in ink. Couched in phrasing that she wasn’t a supraliminal being, but she knew better. Her friends, the Walter family, hell, the whole scientific community and by extension the world when the academic paywall went down, all knew, presumably for years, that she had been. In. Love.

She abruptly disengaged from QWERTY’s interface, but she could still see the report findings as if they were superimposed onto the walls of her room.

* * *

Word association brought back a memory. She couldn't grasp every detail of it, but she had recorded the visual and audio of her five meter peripheral at least.

The reporter had asked her about a rumor that she was in love. She had unknowingly deflected the question with a ‘huh?’ and The Spine took over for her, waxing philosophical for the paper.

As he spoke, she mouthed behind her hand to The Jon, “There's a rumor I'm in love?”

He looked out off-stage into the small crowd of reporters while he answered, but at the time she hadn’t considered it a sign that he had any trouble looking her in the eyes. “Probably with some fan or something who really wants it to be true. You know how celebrity rumors are.”

* * *

Her processor was heating up. In a rush, it all became overwhelming. Confused, over the facts she now had at hand. Delighted, for knowing what love was and felt like. Furious, for the carelessness with which her heart had been handled. Embarrassed, by how everyone but her seemed to have realized what had happened. Grieved, over the years spent in guilt that she had ‘cared too much’ about a ‘malfunction.’

And devastated, when it became clear that she had just been bottling up, and never quite finished letting go of her Honeybee.

She had only ever overloaded a circuit with emotional processing once before, with the first Peter Walter’s passing. She was lucid enough to realize that she needed to parse out what she was feeling and not let herself get too worked up. It would be mortifying to have to wait until someone found her and offered her a replacement fuse when by all accounts she had moved on from this roughly forty years ago.

Avoiding a circuit overload was apparently not as simple as a one-step process of telling herself not to.

* * *

“Hey there!” Camille said as Rabbit powered back on, acting chipper as if she had no idea what she had just repaired. “You’re not supposed to be shut down.”

“Ha, yeah.” Without having to think about it, Rabbit knew she had been out for 1.84232 days. Long enough for everyone to be worried that she wasn’t just ignoring their calls into her room; not long enough for her problem to feel irrelevant.

Camille leaned over the back of Rabbit’s head as it rested on her writing desk, fiddling with one thing or another inside it. “Sorry I’m late, I couldn’t find the right damn screwdriver size. And, I totally should have kept better tabs on those older fuses.”

It was polite language, but Rabbit was too exhausted to be anything but honest. “Don’t tighten up the bolts too much. I blew through more than one the last time I did this.”

She could feel Camille tighten them each an extra half-turn more than strictly necessary. “I upped your ampacity on this circuit. I know it’s the Walter Worker way to keep as many of the original parts as possible, but it would be plain cruel of me to allow you to go on, all limited in the intensity of emotions you can safely feel. And the handbook has a clause for sympathy for your livelihood, so the Walters can’t fire me for pitying you.” She stuck her tongue out at her, but with Rabbit’s eyes deskward she missed it.

“They’d never dream of it.”

Camille was not a silent worker, too doting, and she chatted in an amicable comfortableness while she closed up the last few hatches and started sewing back in her hair. Rabbit was thankful that she never asked what had set her into shutdown, but she figured she could have only asked for so much grace when the answer to "who knows I blew a fuse?" turned out to be pretty much everyone in the manor. Camille wasn't sure who specifically had found her unresponsive but multiple people had come to alert her.

When the repairs were done, Rabbit ran her fingers through her hair and bucked up enough courage to ask something she knew she’d never be able to ask later. “...So, with this new ampacity, I can have as much or as many feelings as I want?”

“Well I don't know about _want_ , they're sort of on a need basis aren't they? But yeah, feel free to express yourself. Sing in the shower, cry in the rain. Actually, don't do either of those until your next waterproofing.”

Despite her circumstantial seriousness, Camille’s presence amused Rabbit and helped her feel less alone. But it also made her all too aware that she couldn’t be around her friends all the time. “Hey, how uh, what do I do now? How do I move on from here?”

Camille scoffed. “Oh really? Come on now! How do I prove my athleticism, Billie Jean King asks me. How do I stop people from getting polio, Jonas Salk asks me.” To hide that she was aware of how vulnerable Rabbit felt, she spoke over her shoulder as she finished packing away her set of tools. “You do what you were put on this earth to do.”

* * *

She drafted hundreds of versions of the song. A fair amount of them were cutting and cruel. The vast majority were desperate for some sort of intangible forgiveness.

Some people would tell her it was crazy of her to think that someone made of gears could feel something as human as love. That book she had read from the human perspective of internal diagnostics would have told her it was crazy to still care deeply for someone who hurt her.

This time her isolation lasted only a few days, which she looked back on as a marked improvement. The grieving period was much shorter than it had been in the seventies, because she had to the knowledge of something she hadn’t had before.

She knew now that she had not experienced any malfunctions. It was not crazy of her to have felt that peculiar experience of being. It was improbable, painful, wonderful love.

* * *

Her friends had been giving her her space, but it was time for an end to all that. When she was ready to share her creation, it was late at night, which meant nothing to her beyond that it was quiet hours for the human of them, so she summoned the automatons individually out of their rooms out into the gardens in the back yard. She had a bundle of papers in her arms that she wouldn’t put aside, and opened doors and garden gates with her shoulders and hips. The Spine had an inkling of what they could be when she motioned that he should bring his guitar.

There was only about a quarter of moon, which made it dark, and their eyes lit each others’ faces. She didn't mean to keep them waiting, but it did take a long time of them all standing in the dark before she could admit that she had a reason to bring them all there. "I have a love song."

"You're in love?" The Spine’s tone was worried. It seemed lately like maybe Rabbit had fallen out of love, which at least seemed easier on her.

"I hope not. I have an I'm-still-in-love song, but I think singing it will release me from it, turning it into an I-had-been-in-love song."  
  
The Jon wondered aloud, "Does that still make it a love song?"   
  
"Well, maybe not. Will you still help me get it out there?"   
  
"Of course we will," The Spine soothed, and Rabbit nodded seriously.

She gave each of them their few sheets of music. She said she wanted to get it all out there in one clean surgical cut, and that she had nothing else to say until it was over. They could all sight-read on par with computers, and she watched them look over the handwritten melodies in one internal rehearsal before they were ready to help her.

When it was over, she cried, and they let her, standing close. The Jon asked if it was still a love song, or if she had successfully transformed it. She said she thought it still might be, but that it was less of one. Less of one now.

* * *

Rabbit edited the song so it ended on a round. It needed the repetition of playing it out a few times in the same way that she needed a release from the Honeybee feedback loop.

She eventually let go of the song enough to introduce it to audiences, and those audiences seemed to enjoy listening to the band play that song in particular, perhaps either identifying with it or interested in the automaton’s admittedly exotic emotions. As time went on, it started to become something she thought of as having taken place in the past. She found that she minded singing the lyrics less and less, having to revisit the time she spent being in love, because she had proved herself to be more than what others thought she could live to be. She was a developed person capable of thought and slang, capable of love, and someone stronger than the loss of it.

* * *

Rabbit meditated for a moment on the echo of the song's final note, muffling the sensory channel of the cheering crowd. When she was ready, she looked into the faces of her friends and smiled at them. They were looking back at her expectantly as they tuned their instruments to the right range for Brass Goggles. They had a few songs left in the set before they could move backstage, and she kept perfect time with each them, singing and dancing in tempo without a malfunction. Her movements that night betrayed that she felt just a little bit freer.

After each performance the question had always been the same, but this time her friends were more visibly hopeful. "Well?" The Jon wanted to know, "Was that a love song?"  
  
"Not anymore. Thank you, guys. Thank you all so much."   
  
She extended her arms and gathered the group in for a hug. None of them needed to eat, or sleep, or breathe, and the moment lived on, as if paused perfectly still, but contented, for as long as Rabbit needed it to last for.   
  
_whirrr whirrr whirrr_

**Author's Note:**

> AU where Rabbit's gender discovery happened sooner, and a few other things etc etc. I definitely took a more “Electricity Is In My Soul” / QWERTY operating system approach than a blue matter / steam-focused one. She probably doesn't actually even use it, but RAM was invented before Vietnam was over and that’s basically the extent of the research I did. I wanted to make Rabbit more of her bubbly self, but I stuck to the tone of hurt/comfort. It's fast-paced but if it were longer I'd never have finished it.
> 
> This almost had Rabbit writing with a fountain pen in her own oil tears but my girlfriend said it was too dramatic.


End file.
